Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Those Who Laugh - Part Four

Their buildings were….different. Because they weren’t
bipeds, the Squids apparently had different ideas about directions and
construction. He had Bob bring him down in what had been one of the largest
cities on the planet. It still was, Tucker supposed, but it had been covered in
a velvety red something. He thought of it as moss, although it clearly wasn’t.

They hadn’t been dead long, as these things went. Bob said
that the last of them would have died around a century before arrival, although
general civilizational collapse had taken place quite a lot before that. It
takes time for an entire species to die.

If you could compare things like that, Tucker would have
said they’d made it to about early twentieth century earth levels of
technology. Like their buildings, their mastery of tools had gone in different
ways than Earth’s had. They had never developed spaceflight. never set foot or,
rather, pod on any of the three moons that orbited their home. There were no
man made satellites, no debris in space. They had lived and died on this one
small world, alone in space.

The Squidworld was a particularly rich find for the Fermi
survey, Bob told him. The way that the Squids had utilized data storage
technology meant that vast chunks of it were able to be scanned and interrupted
by Bob. None of the machines themselves worked, but the data endured. This was
rarely the case with these worlds. Mostly they had to interpret the
civilization from what remained after, educated guess from the manner of their
lives and, quite often, the means of their deaths.

Tucker felt strange, walking through that city. Part of that
was strictly physical; the planet had a different gravity and a different
atmosphere than Earth standard and while it was subtle, he could feel it even
with the encounter suit on. But the bigger part of it was the same feeling he’d
had every time he’d visited a world like this. The sense that he was walking
across someone’s grave. A sense of trespass.

He made his way to and up the tallest building. Eventually.
The Squids didn’t believe in stairs, so he needed some assistance from Bob in
getting to the top of it. He looked out across the city, which stretched as fat
as the eye could see. He looked out at it and if he squinted, ignored the red
moss and the encroachment of nature, what he saw looked very human.

The Squids were far, far removed from homo sapiens, but as
Tucker looked at their works, trying not to despair, he couldn’t help but feel
a kinship. They were Squids, but they were people. They’d lived, they’d worked.
They’d even loved, Tucker was willing to bet. They were like us. And now they
were gone.